Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat

Introducing vLine link: Free, simple WebRTC video chat(blog.vline.com)

29 points by bstrong 12 years ago | 13 comments

wc- 12 years ago |

I am in the process of evaluating options for embedded video chat in a webapp, vLine looks like another potential option (tokbox or OpenTok was the other service I had looked at) so I guess it's time to make some demos. My main points of comparison so far are ease of implementation and pricing.

The developer docs seem pretty easy to read so far, the nodejs example is nice. I'm impressed!

Edit - after some quick testing of the vLine video app, things seem to work fine in chrome, Firefox (stable and aurora) weren't showing online users, and safari (to my surprise because as far as I know safari doesn't support webrtc) showed users and chat worked but didn't support video calls.

Anyone know if Apple/Safari is planning to support WebRTC, or are they still sitting on the sidelines?

tomtheengineer 12 years ago | |

Glad you like it!

We're always excited to see the new things that people build with our platform. The goal for our developer platform is to enable massive parallel experimentation with WebRTC so that people can create applications that are completely new and different from anything that exists today. We believe that by abstracting out the global server backend (and browser differences, etc.) from WebRTC there is a much larger market of developers that can build amazing things involving communication than ever before while only using JavaScript.

If you need any help along the way, don't be shy to contact us (@vlineinc, support@vline.com, http://stackoverflow.com/questions/tagged/vline)

tomtheengineer 12 years ago | |

Regarding your edit: Chrome and Firefox both support WebRTC out of the box. I'll look at the Firefox issue you mentioned (it should work).

Apple has participated in the WebRTC standard discussion (mainly pushing for H264 as the codec standard), but have kept silent on when/if they will release it in Safari.

Microsoft/Skype have been participating, but no word on when it will be in IE.

e12e 12 years ago | |

Not really related to vline, but I've been keeping half an eye on ignite real-time, and it might be worth a look if you want xmpp+webrtc:

http://community.igniterealtime.org/blogs/ignite/2013/04/29/...

oninojak 12 years ago |

Seems nice but turns out to be the worst kind of service: instead of offering the marketed video chat, clicking 'go'displays a big advertisement for google chrome. I really hate those 'free' product that try to push chrome on you.

So I tried again in firefox (because I value privacy too much to ever install google products), and now I have a box with "connecting to room..." accompanied by a sad attempt to give away my data to google analytics and that's it.

So much for "copy. paste. video chat.", more like "relinquish your privacy to google, do that again, copy, paste, hope this will work".

I'm sure I'm happy web browsers are getting the ability to control webcams and watch as your surf the web.

tomtheengineer 12 years ago | |

Sorry you had a bad experience. It does work in Firefox, although there are bugs in the current stable version (which is why we are encouraging Chrome). Specifically, two nasty ones are audio echo (https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=916331) and audio latency (up to 10 seconds: https://bugzilla.mozilla.org/show_bug.cgi?id=785584).

What version of Firefox are you using? What OS?

dinduks 12 years ago |

I've been looking for software to video chat without being locked in an ecosystem (especially Google Hangouts), and WebRTC seems to do the trick just fine while being completely decentralized. I just tried vLine and the quality is pretty good compared to Skype for example. Thank you vLine. :)

By the way, is HD video not supported or is the problem from my side?

tomtheengineer 12 years ago | |

HD is supported, but we haven't enabled it yet for vLine link. We're waiting until we can do a better job detecting whether both ends can handle the HD stream, since the current WebRTC code doesn't do a great job of CPU load feedback (e.g., sending a 720p HD stream to a low-powered machine).

If you want to try out HD, register for a developer account at https://vline.com/developer/ and try the "Web Client". There is a drop-down menu on the "Video Call" button that lets you select HD (make sure to also choose that when you answer. The other option is to try GitTogether, which is just our Web Client with a GitHub login: https://gittogether.com.

dinduks 12 years ago | | |

What might be a good idea is allowing HD and disabling it by default, letting people choose if they want it or not.

I tried GitTogether and HD worked like a charm. The only problem is that resolution doesn't scale to the Internet speed, which means HD all the time but at low frame rate. However, the service is awesome and has a bright future in my opinion. Good luck!

evolve2k 12 years ago |

Couldn't see from the article, does it support more than 2 computers on the video chat, aka Hangouts style?

tomtheengineer 12 years ago | |

Yes, it supports multiple people -- we probably should have mentioned that.

csense 12 years ago |

Does anyone have experience with self-hosted FOSS solutions for WebRTC based plugin-free video chat?

tomtheengineer 12 years ago | |

We're going to be covering a WebRTC codelab (written by Sam Dutton at Google) at the SF HTML5 WebRTC Hack Day (http://www.meetup.com/sfhtml5/events/139666482/) tomorrow:

https://bitbucket.org/webrtc/codelab

Another good set of WebRTC resources: https://github.com/muaz-khan/WebRTC-Experiment

For STUN/TURN, you'll probably want to take a look at this server: https://code.google.com/p/rfc5766-turn-server/